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For an Ecology of Images
When Susan Sontag first proposed the idea of an "ecology of images," she meant it as an exhortation to be vigilant against the vast surplus of pictures threatening our ability to truly see. Today, beyond the deep anxieties over a diminishing attention economy, concern focuses on the environmental cost of storing and circulating the digital images that confront us with unprecedented speed.
Against the disposable rapidity demanded by digital media, Peter Szendy emphasizes the labor and time required for images to develop and come into view. This inquisitive essay takes us from mimicry in the animal kingdom to the history of the shadow, Pliny's story about the birth of painting to Nabokov's butterflies, the first use of slo-mo in film to the first aerial photograph.
Praise for Peter
"From book to book, Peter Szendy is in the process of constructing one of the most singular philosophical oeuvres of our time."
- Laurent de Sutter, Focus vif
"A writer of exquisite sensitivity and wit, as well as of impeccable clarity."
- Gil Anidjar, Columbia University
Against the disposable rapidity demanded by digital media, Peter Szendy emphasizes the labor and time required for images to develop and come into view. This inquisitive essay takes us from mimicry in the animal kingdom to the history of the shadow, Pliny's story about the birth of painting to Nabokov's butterflies, the first use of slo-mo in film to the first aerial photograph.
Praise for Peter
"From book to book, Peter Szendy is in the process of constructing one of the most singular philosophical oeuvres of our time."
- Laurent de Sutter, Focus vif
"A writer of exquisite sensitivity and wit, as well as of impeccable clarity."
- Gil Anidjar, Columbia University
106 pages, Kindle Edition
Published January 28, 2025
7 people are currently reading
153 people want to read
About the author
Peter Szendy
65 books13 followersPeter Szendy is a French philosopher and musicologist. He is the David Herlihy Professor of Humanities and Comparative Literature at Brown University. His Écoute, une histoire de nos oreilles is a critique of Romantic and Modernist conceptions of listening.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
February 2, 2025
Dense and somewhat esoteric—really took my grand delusions about slowly getting good at reading philosophy (& Co.) and smooshed them into something indistinct and sticky that you scrape off the bottom of the paper basket—but fascinating: For an Ecology of Images calls to consider the life of images, their economics (that is, 'housekeeping' and utility) and ecological relations.
(And, as Szendy is wont to point out, with the philosopher's want to critically eye language and vivisect etymology, 'ecology' means an 'economy of organisms' as Haeckel coined it — and 'economy of organisms' has already a common articulation, one of God-given teleology and human use, reaching to and before Linnaeus. ( ...replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth ) Writing about how we choose to evaluate life and extinction, in 1919 young Imre Kinszky (Szendy's own great-uncle) saw the danger of smuggling in “theistic elements” bequeathed by tradition and simply carried up “beneath the wings of the drive to objectivity” that supposedly characterized modern science.
Thus – sidewise, against the grain of word-use – Peter Szendy invokes ecology, as a ' watchword for a new attention to time, to all the divergent and dissonant temporalities hat work within, through, and around images.'
He regards the image first as something organic, which emerged from the world beyond use and is never truly unliving - and its development as something recursive, which swallows itself. There is something definitely Bergsonian in the ways Szendy regards time: as something which devours and collapses back on itself, future folding into past folding into the present and vice versa (implying that I understand Bergson, which I don't.)
When drawing on actual biological evidence, some of the relations Szendy sees in development and evolutions feel, to me, kind of sloppy for the sake of the poeticism of movement in-between the material and the metaphorical.
(Though, damn, is he good at the poeticism.)
(Incl. in the sense of 'poetry' as 'truth'.)
There might be a problematic, contradictory aspect to that biological portion of the book's argument. One proceeds naturally a priori a quite anthropocentric interpretation of natural phenomena — I can't help but feel that any attempt to show a liberation away from anthropocentric economy is inherently built in mud. For example, he takes as given how the image of mimicry in stick insects (animal imitating plant matter, a "lower", more "primitive", "immobile" life form) is a king of retrograde movement, a freeze frame.
But, of course, a plant is more primitive only in the supremacist logic of animals.
And minerals are frozen and inert only in comparison with the organic systems. (Signed, sincerely, a thin-skinned baloon bag of solvents sloshing around on the razorblade edge of homeostasis.)
In geologic time, a mountain itself moves.
Curiously, an observation: Szendy talks of how images proliferate now (fecundly so, to a 100% saturation (speedrun, lesgoooooooo) beyond Benjamin's wildest fears), and so, inevitably, of digital communication and the concrete implications of its infrastructure: the saturation of our wavelengths, the colonial legacy and ecological damage of undersea cables, how our orbital space is increasingly polluted by our debris which may render satellite technology impossible. (This is capitalism's inborn death drive. Welcome. Where do the ducks go when all ponds freeze over?)
I've noticed a chilling awareness in literature of how wasteful, how energy-ravenous, and how precarious, doomed to transience, our digital infrastructure and its products are. (Recently in Grafton Tanner's Foreverism there was a fascinating observation on the non-permanence of digital archives: we tell ourselves that "everything is on the internet forever", but servers shut down, formats are rendered unreadable, and the great majority of internet culture will be (has been) lost. Our mortal bodies are likely to outlast it.) I am not well-read in the field enough to actually determine how conclusive or actual this observation is; but I would suspect it to be fairly recent, and to only become more wide-spread.
...In his second essay, Szendy pivots to an Bataillian understanding of economy on an universal scale, one that takes "the perspective of the excess of energy." In this vein: capitalism, endlessly reducing the world into things that it can absorb, and putting out more so it can consume more. 'We are living in a space fully engorged with images (a “one hundred percent image space,” as Walter Benjamin writes).'
Bataillie's solution is one of surpassing economics, of unconstricted generosity that subverts and transcends conceptions of value, and so obliterates value exchange, an example of pure light: 'Bataille opposes the “extraordinary loss” that characterizes the Sun (as a “incandescent star” that “lavishes its force in space,” that gives without counting) and “the absence of radiation” that characterizes the earth. As one moves from the “central core” of the earth toward the earth’s crust and the atmosphere, there is an “ever higher power [to] no longer expend, but rather consume.”
“The crowning achievement of this tendency is anthropocentrism,” Bataille continues . . .'
Relating to a narrative from Calvino's Cosmicomics, which is paradoxically accurate in its comical musics on time and communications and accurately paradoxical in its musings on the drift of galaxies and traversal of space in an exponentially expanding universe (implying that I understand astrophysics, which I don't.) Szendy concludes where the proliferation of images, and the saturation of wavelength space, and the image's own life and being (must) end:
An overabundance of images sent up into excess, an excessive exuberant flux which is sent up into the cosmos, red-shifted into invisibility; devoid of economic value and ecological purpose, a self-sufficient existing-for-itself gift to the cosmic vacuum. (Implying that I understood this, which I don't (imply).)
___________
{ This is a review of an advanced reader's copy, generously provided by Verso Books, publishers of Interesting Shit™ (Do not quote.) and NetGalley. ty. }
___________
P.S. There is a potential angle of approach when speaking of organic life and economics (etymologically, "housekeeping") with "housekeeping genes" - the term for the set of genes which are constantly continuously expressed in all cells as a matter of the basic necessary functions as life. As of the nature of what they are, housekeeping genes tend to be pretty much the same throughout wildly distantly related organisms. (There is a strong incentive not to mess around with the recipe for, say, making proteins because 99,99999% of all results lead to goop soup where the entropy-rope-dancing water bag of your progeny was supposed to be.) I don't know what to do with that simple linguistic similarity, but I'm pointing it out, because I think there might be something to be cooked here.
(You are welcome to take this for your thesis, or something. Do not quote me, quoting me would surely be ruinous to your academic credulity, for invoking me summons me on the morning of your presentation whereupon I shall surely steal all your left socks.)
(And, as Szendy is wont to point out, with the philosopher's want to critically eye language and vivisect etymology, 'ecology' means an 'economy of organisms' as Haeckel coined it — and 'economy of organisms' has already a common articulation, one of God-given teleology and human use, reaching to and before Linnaeus. ( ...replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth ) Writing about how we choose to evaluate life and extinction, in 1919 young Imre Kinszky (Szendy's own great-uncle) saw the danger of smuggling in “theistic elements” bequeathed by tradition and simply carried up “beneath the wings of the drive to objectivity” that supposedly characterized modern science.
Thus – sidewise, against the grain of word-use – Peter Szendy invokes ecology, as a ' watchword for a new attention to time, to all the divergent and dissonant temporalities hat work within, through, and around images.'
He regards the image first as something organic, which emerged from the world beyond use and is never truly unliving - and its development as something recursive, which swallows itself. There is something definitely Bergsonian in the ways Szendy regards time: as something which devours and collapses back on itself, future folding into past folding into the present and vice versa (implying that I understand Bergson, which I don't.)
When drawing on actual biological evidence, some of the relations Szendy sees in development and evolutions feel, to me, kind of sloppy for the sake of the poeticism of movement in-between the material and the metaphorical.
(Though, damn, is he good at the poeticism.)
(Incl. in the sense of 'poetry' as 'truth'.)
[...] Isn’t there an automimicry implied in any mimicry and thus in any organic iconogenesis? To resemble something or someone, with the time and energy that this takes, is to force oneself to become like something in the self that is already related to the other. It is to work toward the direction of that which in the self already differs from the self.
(p. 60, bolded text my emphasis)
There might be a problematic, contradictory aspect to that biological portion of the book's argument. One proceeds naturally a priori a quite anthropocentric interpretation of natural phenomena — I can't help but feel that any attempt to show a liberation away from anthropocentric economy is inherently built in mud. For example, he takes as given how the image of mimicry in stick insects (animal imitating plant matter, a "lower", more "primitive", "immobile" life form) is a king of retrograde movement, a freeze frame.
But, of course, a plant is more primitive only in the supremacist logic of animals.
And minerals are frozen and inert only in comparison with the organic systems. (Signed, sincerely, a thin-skinned baloon bag of solvents sloshing around on the razorblade edge of homeostasis.)
In geologic time, a mountain itself moves.
Curiously, an observation: Szendy talks of how images proliferate now (fecundly so, to a 100% saturation (speedrun, lesgoooooooo) beyond Benjamin's wildest fears), and so, inevitably, of digital communication and the concrete implications of its infrastructure: the saturation of our wavelengths, the colonial legacy and ecological damage of undersea cables, how our orbital space is increasingly polluted by our debris which may render satellite technology impossible. (This is capitalism's inborn death drive. Welcome. Where do the ducks go when all ponds freeze over?)
I've noticed a chilling awareness in literature of how wasteful, how energy-ravenous, and how precarious, doomed to transience, our digital infrastructure and its products are. (Recently in Grafton Tanner's Foreverism there was a fascinating observation on the non-permanence of digital archives: we tell ourselves that "everything is on the internet forever", but servers shut down, formats are rendered unreadable, and the great majority of internet culture will be (has been) lost. Our mortal bodies are likely to outlast it.) I am not well-read in the field enough to actually determine how conclusive or actual this observation is; but I would suspect it to be fairly recent, and to only become more wide-spread.
...In his second essay, Szendy pivots to an Bataillian understanding of economy on an universal scale, one that takes "the perspective of the excess of energy." In this vein: capitalism, endlessly reducing the world into things that it can absorb, and putting out more so it can consume more. 'We are living in a space fully engorged with images (a “one hundred percent image space,” as Walter Benjamin writes).'
Bataillie's solution is one of surpassing economics, of unconstricted generosity that subverts and transcends conceptions of value, and so obliterates value exchange, an example of pure light: 'Bataille opposes the “extraordinary loss” that characterizes the Sun (as a “incandescent star” that “lavishes its force in space,” that gives without counting) and “the absence of radiation” that characterizes the earth. As one moves from the “central core” of the earth toward the earth’s crust and the atmosphere, there is an “ever higher power [to] no longer expend, but rather consume.”
“The crowning achievement of this tendency is anthropocentrism,” Bataille continues . . .'
Relating to a narrative from Calvino's Cosmicomics, which is paradoxically accurate in its comical musics on time and communications and accurately paradoxical in its musings on the drift of galaxies and traversal of space in an exponentially expanding universe (implying that I understand astrophysics, which I don't.) Szendy concludes where the proliferation of images, and the saturation of wavelength space, and the image's own life and being (must) end:
An overabundance of images sent up into excess, an excessive exuberant flux which is sent up into the cosmos, red-shifted into invisibility; devoid of economic value and ecological purpose, a self-sufficient existing-for-itself gift to the cosmic vacuum. (Implying that I understood this, which I don't (imply).)
___________
{ This is a review of an advanced reader's copy, generously provided by Verso Books, publishers of Interesting Shit™ (Do not quote.) and NetGalley. ty. }
___________
P.S. There is a potential angle of approach when speaking of organic life and economics (etymologically, "housekeeping") with "housekeeping genes" - the term for the set of genes which are constantly continuously expressed in all cells as a matter of the basic necessary functions as life. As of the nature of what they are, housekeeping genes tend to be pretty much the same throughout wildly distantly related organisms. (There is a strong incentive not to mess around with the recipe for, say, making proteins because 99,99999% of all results lead to goop soup where the entropy-rope-dancing water bag of your progeny was supposed to be.) I don't know what to do with that simple linguistic similarity, but I'm pointing it out, because I think there might be something to be cooked here.
(You are welcome to take this for your thesis, or something. Do not quote me, quoting me would surely be ruinous to your academic credulity, for invoking me summons me on the morning of your presentation whereupon I shall surely steal all your left socks.)
February 5, 2025
One of the joys of reading is the way it stretches and challenges. In this case, I was overwhelmed by the creative use of words. Words were manipulated, mangled, taken apart and put back together in ways I had to stop and think about. If you have an itch in your brain you can't quit seem to scratch, try reading something just beyond your current understanding. It is such a frustrating and fulfilling experience. I am doubly curious about the translation process. The use of vocabulary is so precise, I want to know how closely the author and translator collaborated and if the creative use of English was inspired by the way words are put together in other languages. The author is pulling ideas from a variety of places, many of which were originally in a language other than English so this seems likely but I am just guessing. Did I understand everything I read? No. Did I spend time looking up words and ideas throughout the reading process? Yes. And I feel like my poetry in particular has already improved from the experience. I highly recommend this for the exposure to vocabulary and ideas you won't encounter anywhere else. Thank you to the author, publisher, and NetGalley for the eARC.
November 23, 2025
Couched as a rebuttal to Susan Sontag's assertion that there can never be an "ecology of images", given that we're inundated with pictures that "used to shock and arouse indignation", but now "no one can ration horror or keep fresh it's ability to shock". All of this image fatigue theoretically induces a kind of torpor, and has political implications downstream. Lots of neologisms coined for this book: iconomy, iconofugal, iconological, icona pop, etc.
This thing really reads more like a coda than reaction, given how many of the fundamental premises in here rely on Sontag's work but are merely repurposed to point in different directions. Idk. It feels like Sue has a young, hungry franchisee out there.
There are a few sonorous points about images being freight in the attention economy, though nothing mega groundbreaking on that front as of press time. We know "looking is labor", and it creates value for platforms. Many of us moonlight a few hours for Meta every day. Visibility is privatized. The over-production of images and videos under AI is tied closely to the over-extraction of Earth's resources. Given everything that this short lil vademecum touches on, it can feel both thorough and meandering, which I very much enjoyed as it makes a semi-academic text feel like less of an assignment.
This thing really reads more like a coda than reaction, given how many of the fundamental premises in here rely on Sontag's work but are merely repurposed to point in different directions. Idk. It feels like Sue has a young, hungry franchisee out there.
There are a few sonorous points about images being freight in the attention economy, though nothing mega groundbreaking on that front as of press time. We know "looking is labor", and it creates value for platforms. Many of us moonlight a few hours for Meta every day. Visibility is privatized. The over-production of images and videos under AI is tied closely to the over-extraction of Earth's resources. Given everything that this short lil vademecum touches on, it can feel both thorough and meandering, which I very much enjoyed as it makes a semi-academic text feel like less of an assignment.
Read
October 28, 2024As much as I hate doing this, I've DNF'd not far into this one. I was anticipating something MUCH less dense and accessible for the layperson. The images are certainly beautiful, just not enough to make me read pages that are more academic than anecdotal or actionable.
I don't think this is completely the book's fault, it is more that we don't make the pair I thought we would. I'm not the intended audience for this, but still really appreciate the opportunity to experience Pete Szendy's writing.
Because I DNF'd, I will not be including a rating.
{Thank you bunches to NetGalley, Peter Szendy, and Verso Books for the eARC in exchange for my honest review!}
I don't think this is completely the book's fault, it is more that we don't make the pair I thought we would. I'm not the intended audience for this, but still really appreciate the opportunity to experience Pete Szendy's writing.
Because I DNF'd, I will not be including a rating.
{Thank you bunches to NetGalley, Peter Szendy, and Verso Books for the eARC in exchange for my honest review!}
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews